1. Technical Field
This invention relates to shopping carts and more particularly, to an in-cart grocery tabulation system and associated method for providing users with an easy and convenient means of automatically identifying and calculating the total cost of groceries present in a shopping cart.
2. Prior Art
In the past grocery stores did not have shopping carts. A customer would ask the clerk for the items he intended to purchase and the clerk would go around the store, gather and package the items and total the price of the purchase for the customer. When shopping cart was first introduced to stores, common wisdom was that the customers would never find the items they wanted without help. As customers grew accustomed to the layout of the stores, the stores were able to service more customers with fewer employees. The grocery cart allowed store employees to concentrate on stocking the shelves and checking out customers. The store's employees no longer had to gather the items for the customer; this resulted in improved productivity for grocery stores, which in turn resulted in lower prices for the consumer.
As this store format became accepted, one of the major labor costs for stores became checking out customers. Checkers were required to hand enter the price and to bag every item. This was a slow, inaccurate process and the major bottleneck in the grocery sales process. This problem was alleviated by the introduction of a bar code on products and a bar code scanner at the check out lines. This allowed checkers to greatly increase their productivity and accuracy. It also greatly improved inventory management and purchasing accuracy. However, customer lines at the check-out were not significantly reduced, since most stores used this productivity advantage to reduce the number of checkers. Added to this, customers may return items at the checkout counters due to budget over-runs and thus increase the labor cost of stores having to return the rejected items back to their original location on the shelves
Accordingly, a need remains for a system in order to overcome the above-noted shortcomings. The present invention satisfies such a need by providing an in-cart grocery tabulation system that is convenient and easy to use, is durable yet lightweight in design, is versatile in its applications, and automatically identifies and calculates the total cost of groceries present in a shopping cart.